Can't Stop Saab-in'

I never thought I'd be sad to hear of the demise of a car brand, particularly one of a car I've never owned.  But the death of Saab is making me surprisingly melancholy.

I've only driven one Saab, once.  It was about fifteen years old and had had several previous owners, but it was still a powerful, liberating experience.  The feeling was hard to describe.  The closest I can come is to say it is the same feeling I have when I step off a plane in a country I haven't visited before:  one of adventure, of appreciation for something foreign yet familiar, of the potential for something interesting, cool, and memorable to happen at any second.

My dream sports car for years has been a Jaguar XKR, but once I had kids I realized that was likely to stay a dream for a long time given its price tag -- absent a best-selling novel, a winning lottery ticket, or a wealthy, distant relative randomly deciding to leave me everything and then kicking the bucket, all of which are about equally probable (which is to say, not at all).  Next in line was a Saab 9-3 convertible.   Though I bought an SUV when kid number two arrived, I kept my ten year old old Acura Integra since it had (1) been a gift from my mother and (2) no trade in value anyway, with the depression-era thought that in another 14 years or so I could hand over the keys to kid number one, thus saving the used car shopping angst.  Still, I nurtured a secret fantasy that if the Acura ever died, I'd replace it with a brand spanking new Saab 9-3.  Thanks, GM, for dashing another of my increasingly few secret fantasies into teeny, tiny fragments.

Apart from its style and the fact that its cars weren't a dime a dozen even on the luxury car clogged freeways of California, one of the coolest things about Saab, to me, anyway, was its origins as an aircraft builder.  Come to think of it, maybe that's why the feeling I had while driving one was one of descending an airplane into new territory.  And that's probably what the fantasy is all about at its root anyway:  freedom, adventure, and possibility.

**Morgana**

Fear Itself?

What the hell is wrong with the Democrats?

Why must they waste the amazing opportunity they have been given -- majorities in both houses of Congress and the Presidency – by not passing health care legislation that is truly universal?  It sure seems like this is what is happening, though I still hold out hope for a miracle.

Are they so beholden to the insurance lobby that they are simply paralyzed, and can only mumble something about how much it’s going to cost (while voting for innumerable other costly projects that are not nearly as important to peoples' lives) because they’re afraid to say their real concerns:  they need that insurance lobby money to get reelected?  My boyfriend, a far more paranoid individual than myself, thinks this is about more than money and reelection.  He thinks it's about insurance industry corporate henchmen, mysterious disappearances, apparent suicides that aren't really suicides, the stuff of movie thrillers.  He may have a point, but I think it's more likely insurance companies would retaliate by simply waiting until their enemies have life-threatening illnesses and then denying their claims for care on the basis these people had acne as teenagers and didn't disclose it when asked about preexisting conditions.

But whatever the origin of the fear, can this really be just about fear? Until now I’d refused to believe the so-called "Blue Dog" Democrats are fundamentally incompetent or unprincipled to a person, but if this isn’t about fear, perhaps I should rethink that. Otherwise there is simply no excuse for not adopting health care legislation that includes a public option.

What the hell is wrong with the Democrats?

Mostly I blame President Obama for not stepping in quickly enough to take charge of the debate instead of letting it flail and languish while doubt was cast over every portion of the bill that made any sense if what you care about at the end of the day is making sure there is universal health care. Then muddying the waters with the diversion of the Afghanistan strategy before the health care vote was even had.

I voted for Obama in part because I thought he had chutzpah, and I thought he had principles. I thought he cared more about those principles than reelection. What I wanted to see him do with health care is go knock heads together and get a public option passed; and, by the way, why should he even have to knock heads together since there’s a Democratic majority in Congress?

What the hell is wrong with the Democrats?

I wanted to see President Obama stare into the face of the fear that demanding his party pass legislation including a public option would mean he wouldn’t be reelected – and do it anyway. I wanted to see him bet his Presidency on this, because he believed in it. Somehow, I think if he had done so, his approval ratings would have zoomed through the roof for one simple reason.  It would show he was not afraid. Not being afraid would make him different from every other politician currently in office in this country. What is the point of being elected if you’re too afraid to get the job done once you’ve gotten elected?

The tragedy is there is an opportunity here to make a statement that every person is entitled to health care as a fundamental human right. Once you accept that health care is a fundamental human right, you can’t let concerns about money get in the way. You have to find a way to make it work for every American. This is the lesson from the Medicare experience – get the bill passed and then find a way to pay for it. And watch it become one of the most popular US government actions of all time.

We all know people who say it’s not a good time to have kids, buy a house, you name whatever the dream may be, because they’re afraid of the financial commitment. The fallacy is, if you have those fears, there will never be a “good” time. There is no good time, there’s just the time you decide to take a bold step into fear because it is worth it to do so.  And a good many people who do, when they look back on that step, can't imagine not having taken it because their lives are so much better for it.  What makes it even sweeter is the knowledge that they conquered their fear in taking the step toward what they now feel is the best thing they ever did.

It’s astonishing and more than a little nauseating to think that though the United States is the only superpower, we’re unable to provide affordable health care to all our people. So many other countries that are nowhere near superpower status have made this commitment. Why?  Because it is the right thing to do.  And the stakes are incredibly high here if we don't do the right thing.  They are, literally, a life and death matter.

(By the way, the number 2 son decided to be a skeleton for Halloween this year after striking out on finding a snake costume.  Scary, isn't he?)

What the hell is wrong with the Democrats?

My father was a medical academic. He devoted his life to research to enable others to heal, and teaching others to heal, because although like everyone else he needed to make a living he couldn’t stomach accepting money from sick people to make them well. Instead of making the sort of money doctors in private practice made, he made a lot less, but he adored his work and he viewed provision of health care as a noble calling.  And he viewed health care as a right every human has, just because they are human.

I am certain that he would have expressed the same sentiment I’m going to about my own political party, though he’d probably have used the phrase “they stank it up.” In my view there’s only one phrase to describe the Democrats when it comes to health care: They’re all a bunch of pussies.

And shame on Joe Lieberman, too.  So much for tikkun olam.

**Morgana**

Three Things Restaurant Staffers Should Always Do

During my workout a couple of weeks ago, I was listening to NPR when I heard a piece on a post in the You're the Boss blog by a fellow named Bruce Buschel called 100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do (Part 1).  I wondered whether he'd cover any of my particular pet peeves in Part 2, but I just took a gander at 100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do (Part 2) and it seems not.  So I hereby append the following to Mr. Buschel's list.

Here are three things restaurant staffers, in particular wait-folk, should always do when the party has one or more small children in it.  There's a theme here:  the sooner you start bringing things to the table, the more money you are likely to make, and the sooner you'll get rid of the noisy, melt-down-having children (who will be noisier and more likely to melt down if you don't start bringing things to the table as soon as humanly possible).

One:  Don't Wait to Bring the Kids' Food Until the Adults' Food is Ready

Experienced waiters or those who are parents frequently do this without prompting, but it should be written in the rule book.   If there are kids under, oh say, seven or eight at the table, you should offer to take their orders first and get their food started, then come back for the adults' orders if they're undecided.  You should then offer to bring the kids' orders to the table as soon as they are ready, and you should be sure that they are ready a reasonable time after the order is placed.  There's no excuse for chicken nuggets not being ready before pretty much anything an adult could order except maybe the soup du jour.

Here's the rationale.  Generally, parents have to do some helping with kids this age, which can range from cutting pieces of meat for older kids to spoonfeeding toddlers. If all the food comes at the same time, the adults don't get to eat theirs before it gets cold.  It also gets in the way while the adult is playing the helping role, and it can't be enjoyed until the kids are set up and chowing down in any case.  Also, in my experience, kids who are young enough to have a hard time sitting still anywhere aren't going to be better at it at restaurants no matter how many crayons or toys they have with them.  Once the sights and smells of food are passing by them to other tables, they're ready to eat and feeding them is the best hope there is of keeping them occupied for any length of time.

Two:  Be Attentive To The Status of the Mom's Wine Glass

When I waited tables in college, the conventional wisdom was that alcoholic beverages were the key to bigger tips.  Get people ordering refills of these high margin products and the bill went up quickly and by multipliers that just couldn't be replicated through food orders.  Bigger bills meant bigger tips.  Bigger tips were good.

And yet, somehow that wisdom has been lost or deemed inapplicable to mothers of preschoolers.  I can't tell you how many times I've only had one drink with dinner though I was entirely willing to have two, or, once in a great while, maybe even three.  Typically it goes like this:  it takes forever to bring the first glass of wine, then after the wine has been consumed the glass sits empty with no waiter in sight until it is too late to drink another one because the kids are melting down and we have to leave.  That waiter just lost somewhere between $8 and $33 added to the bill which could have meant up to $7 or so in additional tip (or more if others at the table are in the same boat), and I just lost one of the temporarily mellowing benefits of the increasingly seldom times we eat out.  We've actually requested that we not be seated in certain waiters' sections at our local haunts for this very reason.

Three:  Be Quick and Efficient, or Be Poor

This is the logical extension of two and three above.  Kids under eight can't be expected to sit still for two or more hours at a time in a restaurant.  They have about 40 minutes of good behavior in them and another half hour of acceptable behavior.  If it takes 20 minutes to take the table's order, or 30 minutes to bring the kids' food, it's unlikely there will be time for dessert.  Not just for the kids, but for the adults too.  Or for dessert wine.  So there's another $30 or more that isn't going to get spent, and upwards of another $6 in tip that won't be left because the behavior will have deteriorated to the point where the only choice is to leave.

It's astonishing to me how many times waiters have left money on the table because our party, quite literally, hasn't left on the table all we'd have been willing to leave.  Instead, we had to high-tail it out of there without ordering additional drinks or dessert.  More food also typically means more mess, and I know a lot of parents who will bump up tips if a kid's place at the table (or the floor underneath) is a mess at the end of a meal even though it probably doesn't take that much additional time to clean up if you're wiping down a table or changing a table cloth anyway.

So let this be a lesson in enlightened self-interest.  We parents like it when you engage with our kids, or at least don't spurn them when they ask you a question -- but we're unlikely to give a bigger tip for that alone.  We'd much rather you be as attentive to our table as you are to the one with the quiet, young, low maintenance couple that is occasionally throwing us amused looks from across the aisle.

**Morgana**

Music to Learn By

It's been 35 years since my eighth grade English class, but I still remember the following little ditty we were required to memorize:

Am, is, are, was, were
Be, being, been
Have, has, had
Do, does, did
Shall, will
Should, would
May, might, must
Can, could.

Our teacher, the much loved, much feared, master of the eighth grade advanced English classroom, would bang out the beat with the flat of his hand on a metal filing cabinet while we all recited these "helping" or "auxiliary" verbs.  We memorized poetry in his class as well, but I only remember the first few stanzas of "The Highwayman" (which we recited with hand motions to signify where the French cocked-hat and bunch of lace were located) and "Paul Revere's Ride," while I've retained this list of words and likely will remember it until I die.

My mother became a substitute teacher at my junior high school when I went to college, and once when I was home visiting she decided it would be funny if I came over to the school and recited "Am Is Are Was Were" for my former teacher.  I humored her, and I was glad I did.  He truly seemed touched that one of his students had retained this tidbit of knowledge for what was then only about ten years after leaving his class. 

If only he were still alive today to witness the conversation on Facebook among many of my former classmates, all of whom,
amazingly, still remember this verse 35 years later.

Although this little poem wasn't set to music, the almost magical way in which we all managed to remember it got me to thinking about the value of lyrical repetition in the experience of learning.  It can't be accidental that one of the first songs we learn as English speakers in America is the ABC song.  My three year old can sing it, even though he can't identify all the letters in the alphabet yet.  When we read an ABC book together, I try to show him how he can propel himself from a letter he recognizes to the next one he doesn't by singing the song.  (An aside:  I'm still amused by the musical identity of ABC, Twinkle, Twinkle, and Baa Baa Black Sheep, which a childless, gay male friend of mine pointed out to me about ten years ago.  If I'd been a mom by then I would doubtless not have missed the connection, since Sesame Street has put all three of them together in the "Alpha Baa Baa Twinkle Song," a preschool favorite.)  As an adult, I took a beginning Hebrew class and my instructor taught us a Hebrew equivalent of the ABC song.  It appears that other alphabets have been set to music as well.  Here's a Russian alphabet song, a Chinese one, an Arabic one, a Thai one, a Japanese one, a Hindi one, a Greek one and even a Yiddish one (sung by a guy in a Spiderman costume and a ushanka -- take that, Debbie Friedman!).

Though I can't say they're part of my repertoire, I found a number of songs on the Internet designed to help remember long lists, such as all the states in the United States, the US Presidents, and the books of the Christian Bible.   And though I'm thinking Tom Lehrer had humor rather than pedagogy in mind when he wrote The Elements, it's out there now on school sites and chemistry blogs for the hard core. 

The success of such songs has not been lost on the business of education.  I found a site for a business devoted to peddling geography lists set to music.  Their slogan:  "You never forget what you sing."  I have to agree -- though the tunes have to be catchy, the lyrics clever, and the main ideas distillable into memorable bites.  I'm not so sure the geography list songs do any of this, though to be fair I haven't listened to anything more than the short samples at the site. I also wonder how successful some of these other  "long list" songs really are at aiding memorization.  Though I only remember "The Highwayman" through "plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair" I remember the whole of "Jabborwocky," another poem we learned in eighth grade English which was (1) much shorter than the others we had to memorize, and (2) the subject of a song in the Disney film, Alice in Wonderland, by means of which I'd already learned the first and last stanzas (which are identical) when I was about seven through repetitive listening to the soundtrack album.  It had a catchy, clever tune in addition to being short.

Catchy and clever songs with focused sound bites definitely stick with.  Potentially forever.  To this day, if I'm called upon to write the word "encyclopedia" I hear Jiminy Cricket singing "Ennn - Cyclopedia, E-N-C-Y-C-L-O-P-E-D-I-A" in my head; it's how I learned to spell the word in the first place.  I'll never forget the Twelve Tribes of Israel, thanks to the "Jacob and Sons" song from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat or the Girl Scout Laws in effect when I was scouting, thanks to a song that I can only find a Girl Guides version of on the web (it was sung to the tune of something that is some college somewhere's school song; my mother knew which one, but I wasn't able to find out which as I'm sadly remiss when it comes to searching for tunes by googling).

Then there are the songs that are more conceptual, like the old School House Rock titles.  "Conjunction Junction," in case you don't remember or hadn't guessed, teaches the grammatical function of conjunctions, and "I'm Just a Bill" teaches how a bill becomes a federal law in the United States.  It's a testament to these songs that at least the choruses stuck with me, and so did the general idea of the chatty parts, even though I didn't have a recording of them and so couldn't listen to them repeatedly.

But the songs I'll remember forever and that I really learned from -- I mean, sitting-in-a-test-singing-to-myself-to-remember-how-to-answer learned from -- are in a class by themselves.  These are from the late 1950s/early 1960s recordings known as the Singing Science Records, which I just can't say enough good things about.

I inherited these records from the three girls who lived across the street (I had all the titles except Experiment Songs, the weakest of the bunch; though at one point one of the girls asked for Space Songs back so now, forty years later, I only have four on vinyl).  I was delighted to find that someone has preserved these long-out-of-print gems on the web.  It saved me the trouble of having to digitize these treasures among children's educational records myself, so my kids could listen to them in the car.  These records were in no small part responsible for one of my earliest ambitions (as an eight-to-12 year old) to be a meteorologist, and the knowledge I gained from repeatedly playing them until I feared I'd wear the grooves out served me well in every introductory science class I ever took.

I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but it's true.  I'll never know which was more instrumental in getting me As:  the basic knowledge from the songs, or the fact that having the basic knowledge from the songs already, I could focus my efforts on learning more advanced concepts.  These songs cover pretty sophisticated topics for their target elementary school audience.  Weather Songs, for example, is worth the price of admission just for the three songs, "The Water Cycle Song," "How Clouds are Formed" and "Stratus and Cumulus," which build upon each other nicely and together explain and help kids identify the basic cloud formations through catchy, very sticky, tunes, and lyrics that hone in on fundamental concepts and use rudimentary scientific terminology to convey them.

I could easily identify by name stratus, cumulus, cirrus, and nimbus clouds and their variants (e.g. strato-cumulus, cumulo-nimus, cirro-stratus) by the time I was around nine, largely because of these songs.  Years later, in college, I took an introductory physical geography course taught by a climatologist.  You guessed it:  we had to know the nomenclature of cloud formations, and I'd already known it and committed it to long term memory through the medium of music years before. 

Though as Jef's site indicates, these records are very "atomic age" in their orientation, the basic science hasn't changed a whole hell of a lot.  Sure, there have been advances in physics and other sciences since these songs were written.  But though I'm no expert, I'd guess the basic physics concepts in "Kinetic and Potential Energy" (which I sang to myself during a test in junior high science to help answer some of the questions), "Jets" and "What is Chemical Energy" are just as valid today as they were then.  Perhaps, were the Singing Science Records to be recorded today, we'd have songs about string theory, too.

Indeed, some of the material is surprisingly timely.  If you want to teach a kid about why global warming is happening, there's a song called "What Does the Glass of a Greenhouse Do" that will accomplish just that (though you'll need to fill in a few blanks after "warm up the earth on cold, cold days").  The messages of the Nature Songs and More Nature Songs albums are decidedly ecological.  I teared up the other day while listening to "The Conservation Song," and it's exhortation to "study conservation, and practice conservation, there's no doubt that it will keep our nation strong" -- it made me realize that this message has been around for my entire lifetime (and before) and we're still, as a nation, struggling with this fundamental truth.

  
Another song that never fails to make me tear up is "The Balance of Nature," and its message that the natural world hangs in a delicate balance that can all too easily be upset ("the balance of nature should be understood; if the balance of nature is ever unbalanced, whatever will happen will not be good").  This is an excellent jumping off point for discussion of rainforests, which were, interestingly, part of my older son's pre-K curriculum.  It also aids discussion of the ecological impact of natural disasters, and as well helping to discuss some of the things that puzzle and terrify young kids.  Like, "why are there bugs?"  And, "why do the bugs have to get eaten by birds?"  Or, "Why do lions eat zebras?"  For the next part, "I don't want the zebras to die," you'll need to improvise a bit.

Nature Songs' "What is an Insect?" teaches that insects all have six legs, antennae, and three parts to their bodies.  "What is a Mammal?" does the same for the mammalian world with a drumbeat that gets the warm-blooded among us ready to pound along :  "Why anyone can tell you what a mammal is, anyone who understands:  they're warm blooded, have hair on their bodies, and suckle their young from mammary glands."  Good for the multiple choice quizzes to come down the road, and entertaining to have your grade schooler sing to uptight dinner guests to see who snickers at the mammary glands line.  Though now that I'm a parent rather than an adult with a memory of being called upon to perform this song to an assembled dinner table crowd as a child, the snickering could simply be because of the undeniable cuteness factor that comes with small children using big words -- particularly those that they obviously understand.

Though my kids are a lot younger than I was when I first started listening to these records, I've already found opportunities to introduce them and make them relevant.  "What is an Animal" and "What are the Parts of a Tree" have already come in useful, as the newly-minted kindergartener is currently studying trees and plants in school.

When I think about the use of meter and rhyme with or without melody for educational purposes, the Singing Science Records will always be the gold standard.  You can still find copies occasionally, at alibris.com or on ebay, so keep looking.  I commend them to you, with love, and with more than a little awe for the lasting role they played in my educational life.

**Morgana**

Morgie's Ten Weight Loss Truths

I have been a normal weight for most of my life thus far. At various times, I might have been ten to fifteen pounds above or below my set point, but I was never in the overweight category or even near it. If I wanted to slim down a bit, it was easy to do. I just went to Weight Watchers for a couple of months and once I was paying attention and working out, the weight dropped.

When I hit my late thirties/early forties, things changed.  Without getting into the personal details, I lost three people who were very significant in my life in the space of about four years, became depressed, recovered, had two kids.  By the beginning of the 21st century, I found myself up about 50 pounds and unable to lose the weight.  Until now.

I felt I’d tried everything, but in truth, I hadn’t. It took some experimentation to find a formula that worked for me, but it appears that at last I have. By combining elements of three different programs and 50-90 minutes of exercise a day, I appear to have hit a sweet spot.  Since July I have been losing weight at the rate of about one to two pounds per week. 

Though I've still got work to do, I feel confident for the first time that I can get there.  Confident enough to offer ten basic truths about my experience. If they sound harsh, it’s because they are. I believe it's because I have accepted them as truths and am working with them instead of fighting against them that I have the right mind set to succeed.

Before I start, let me say my only association with the programs and products mentioned is that I tried them at one time or another.  Indeed, I have no credentials as an expert in this field, and no connection to the weight loss, nutrition or fitness industry, other than as a participant.  So why should you listen to me?  No reason at all, other than that I've been there.  And perhaps that those who are credentialed have a vested interest in making everything seem easy, quick and painless.  I am here to tell you that weight loss is none of those things.  The one thing it is, though, is worth the difficulty, time and pain.

Here are my ten truths.

It is hard.

Just look at the numbers on the obese nation the United States has become. If it was easy, everyone would be thin and healthy. Realize that anything that suggests otherwise is either snake oil or ignorance. Don’t spend money on anything that promises easy weight loss. It’s throwing your cash away. (If you are just dying to throw your cash away, I have a PayPal account that will gladly accept it.)

It takes a long time.

There is no quick fix. It is much harder to lose than to gain. I can gain ten pounds in a day or two, but it takes me a good six weeks of hard work and sacrifice to lose that much. At the risk of stating the obvious, how long it takes depends on how much you have to lose. In my case, I found that after I lost the first 20 pounds, the weight loss sped up a bit. I have no idea why. Perhaps I just became better at the process, perhaps my metabolism got revved up a bit, perhaps a combination, perhaps none of the above. But it is still a long process, unless you can leave your job, your family, and your life to go focus on only weight loss for months and months. Even then, it will take months and months.  Maybe even years and years.  That money you were going to spend on something that promises quick weight loss?  PayPal.

It hurts.

You will be hungry, even to the point of nausea. You will have headaches. You will have sore muscles and painful joints. You will feel psychologically beaten up, deprived, and angry. In my experience, any diet or “lifestyle change” that assures you none of these things will happen isn’t going to work. What does work is acknowledging the pain and pushing through it.

One day, I decided not to eat when I was hungry to the point of nausea, just to see what would happen. It wasn’t time for me to eat, and if I did I’d be in trouble with my Weight Watchers points for the rest of the day. Guess what? It got worse and I felt crappy. But I didn’t throw up, and after about half an hour the feeling passed and I just felt "normal" hunger again. (It took me two years to get the guts even to try this because I have a phobia about vomiting.) After about two weeks of pushing through the nausea-inducing hunger, I stopped getting extremely hungry except when I’m really late for a meal or snack. Or premenstrual.  And then, it is "normal" hunger.

Another example. About a month ago, I went out to eat with my family and another family. The mom, who is one of my closest friends in California, is tall and thin, and though I don't know for sure, I gather she has never been overweight. She ordered deep fried onion rings among other things I would have loved to eat. She does this a lot. Chocolate Belgian waffle at brunch, mud pie type dessert at dinner.  (Of course, I only noticed this when I stopped doing it myself.)  I ordered a salad with chicken breast (and immediately cut the block of feta that came with it in half and discarded half to avoid overeating). She then proceeded to say she thought that a lot of people on The Biggest Loser intentionally gained weight to go on the show, and how she thought she could gain and lose 100 pounds pretty easily, though gaining would be hard.

Despite the fact that she’s one of my closest friends and I know she didn’t mean to push my buttons, I got pissed and snapped something ridiculous like "do you have proof of that?" at her, though it didn't seem ridiculous at the time.  There she was eating her deep fried food and talking about how hard it would be to gain weight and how easy to lose it, while I was being virtuous and suffering. Plus, if she’d ever been obese, she would know that the last thing someone who is obese wants to do is gain.  If you can't take off the weight you already have, it's not going to seem a good idea to try to take off even more. Particularly with $250K at stake. I mean, maybe it does happen.  I have no idea.  But my guess is not so much, unless the entire show is reality in name only and hires actor-poseurs to play the contestants.

In any case, my point is that even silly discussions with your closest friends can hit a sore spot when you're vulnerable from the weeks of hard work, soreness, and deprivation.  I had to acknowledge that it was sheer envy over those damn onion rings and that she doesn't have a weight problem that got a hold of me there for a minute in my weakened state.  I pushed through it, and come out the other side with the realization that it was my problem, not hers -- and feeling pretty ashamed about the whole thing.

It is not a panacea.

The man who doesn’t love you won’t start loving you just because you lost weight (and if he does, he’s a dick). If your nose was too big to start with, losing weight won’t make it small. It might even look bigger now that your face is thinner. You will still have stresses and obstacles in your life, and you’ll still have to deal with them. And if you don’t have some basic self esteem already, losing weight won’t give it to you.

Don’t get me wrong. Losing weight improves health and well-being, enables you to wear nicer clothes and look better in them, and avoids institutional discrimination and interpersonal nastiness based on weight. It removes one reason to be unhappy, and the better health, well-being and appearance that result can all help build self-confidence. There are a lot of great reasons to do it. But it won’t solve all your problems, and, by itself, losing weight will not make you happy. So don’t think it will.

It requires more exercise than you’ve been led to believe.

Seems like every time I turn around there’s a new headline about how little exercise you can get away with and still get health benefits.  I believed the ones that said you only needed about 30 minutes a day to lose weight.  But my body doesn’t see results on that amount of exercise. My body needs to exercise for at least 50 minutes a day to see results. If I don’t see results, I am not motivated to continue. In the immortal words of Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes.   I now feel vindicated, because apparently that moderate exercise recommendation has been re-thunk.  It turns out you need to exercise more than you've been led to believe.

Also, you will need to sweat. Your exercise will have to be intense, not comfortable. Comfortable doesn’t make visible changes in your body, and after a point, it doesn’t increase your fitness level either. You must pant, you must push, you must groan. No pain, no gain. Truly.

Finally, if like me you’re not an exercise addict, you will need to find a motivator. I like weight loss television and Internet sites for this lately, but magazines and books can be great as well. And you will need to get to know yourself pretty well. I know that if I don’t exercise for more than one day, it is exponentially harder for me to get out there on day three. So I have been trying to avoid more than a day without getting to the gym or out for a run. On those days, I try to walk 10,000 steps, even if it takes doing donuts around the house to top off the pedometer at the end of the day. Then I can tell myself I exercised, and I keep my motivation up.

It requires more willpower than you've been led to believe.

I’ve tried a lot of different diets, and what drives me nuts about a lot of them, even the sensible ones like Weight Watchers, is the propaganda that goes something like this: you can eat your favorite foods! You can eat our delicious low calorie [fill in the brand name here] ice cream treats! You can eat as much as you want of X, Y or Z! You’ll feel full and satisfied and willpower will be taken out of the equation!

Bollocks. No, I can’t eat my favorite foods. If I do indulge in the miniscule portion that is permitted, even if I eat it so slowly that it ends up being over a period of three hours, I will not be satisfied. It will merely whet my appetite and I’ll want to eat until it's gone, and then eat some more. And why in the world would I want to waste my calories on diet sweets that don’t taste nearly as good as they look? What’s the point? Eating as much as you want of anything is just a bad idea. It perpetuates the main problem most of us have, which is an inability to control portion sizes.

If you’re going to indulge, you will need to be able to stop and it will take a strong will to do so. There is no magic formula of other things you’re supposed to eat, drinking water, exercising first, that will make this easy.  If you have that sort of willpower, more (will)power to you. If you are like me, it takes about all the willpower you can muster just not to start down that path in the first place.

I anticipate that when I reach my goal, I will splurge from time to time. But for me, it is a derailment waiting to happen if I try to do this while I’m losing.

Yes, I’m going to be hungry, not full and satisfied a fair amount of the time. See truth three above.  I have to believe, though, that it is worth it.

It takes experimenting and willingness to try something different if what you’re doing is not working.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of plans, supplements, drugs and other things I’ve tried: Body for Life, The South Beach Diet, Weight Watchers, The Road Back, Hoodia, Phentermine, Buns of Steel, Leptin Diet, Serotonin Power Diet. I even went to a couple of hospital-run programs designed to help with weight loss.  I learned some things in the process.

For me, low carb, high protein diets only work to a point. I can drop about fifteen pounds, but then I stall, mainly because I can't continue to lose eating the portions I'm eating, but I can't eat less because eating is the only thing that gives me energy.  I feel fatigued, and it makes working out unappealing.

Hoodia did nothing for me.  Phentermine enabled me to lose about twelve pounds without much effort, but it made me feel agitated, made my heart race, gave me insomnia, and sapped my energy. While I was taking it, there were times when I honestly thought I was going to die.  After a while, my body became immune to it and the weight loss stopped.  When I went off of it after about six months, I felt I’d been given a new lease on life.

What works for me has three parts to it.  First, I must eat a low fat diet with “good” carbs from grains, and a moderate amount of protein from sources other than dairy sources.  Second, I must control my portions.  Third, large quantities of fish oil tablets on a daily basis, CLA and vitamins seem to help, along with the aforementioned 50-90 minutes of exercise most days. I eat small amounts of fruit (one serving a day) and milk (about the same, unless you count what I put in my coffee or a tablespoon of parmesan cheese at dinner) and large amounts of vegetables. I do use real butter, but I only use a tablespoon a day at the most.

I track my food consumption religiously with the following exceptions: I don’t count the nonfat milk I put in my coffee, or the occasional bite of dessert or interesting looking snack one of the kids is having (more than a single bite and I’m past my willpower limit). I do still drink alcohol, but only wine (which is mostly what I drank before anyway) and no more than two glasses on the days I do drink, which is at most a couple of times a week these days if we go out to eat, and once in a blue moon if we don’t. I count the calories in the alcohol  toward my daily total. I do still drink Diet Coke; my consumption has even gone up. I'd probably be better off without it, but for now it doesn't seem to be impeding progress.

What works for me may not work for you. Again, it’s about finding that sweet spot. Just because the solution your best friend swears by makes you feel like crap does not mean you can’t find something that works. I'd stay away from things that promise results that seem too good to be true (if they do, they are), or involve primarily eating strange supplements, eating only a single type of food, eating in strange combinations or at strange times, drinking instead of eating, or avoiding a list of foods. All of these might as well be voodoo because they’re about as effective.

It must be a priority.

Weight loss this time around has been like a third job for me. I have the job that pays the bills, the job that raises children, and the job that loses weight.

It’s not just the time it takes to exercise. It’s the time it takes to go grocery shopping, which I hate. It’s the time it takes to cook, which I like sometimes, particularly if it is a social event.  But not if I feel it is required of me as a daily chore. It’s the time it takes to keep a food and exercise journal, and to pack up your gym bag to take to the office. It’s the time it takes to go to physical therapy when your knee starts to bother you from increasing your training. That doesn't leave a lot of time for hobbies, so I hope you aren't addicted to needlepoint.

It is scary.

I never had the classic weight loss worry, that I'd receive unwanted sexual attention.  It was never a problem when I was young and thin, unfortunately.  Now that I'm in my forties... well, let's just say "unwanted" doesn't really work in that sentence. I can't imagine anything more uplifting than feeling admired for the way I look.

My fears tend more toward the hypochondria spectrum.  They go like this:  "I’m losing weight. Me? But I couldn’t before. Something must be wrong.  That colleague of mine who died from pancreatic cancer lost weight.  A lot of weight.  Maybe I have cancer?"  Um, you’re dieting and exercising like a maniac, fool. Get over yourself.  Whatever your personal proclivities, it can be scary to lose weight.

There will be obstacles, frustrations and setbacks.  But in the end, it will be worth it.

My official weigh-in day for the week is Monday, and lately I've been noticing that I drop a pound or more about two days after I weigh in.  I briefly considered changing my weigh-in day, but then I had a vision of the drop showing up two days later anyway and myself endlessly chasing a better weigh-in around the calendar.  My point is that you may not lose every week, or as much as you want to every week.  I've had a couple of weeks where I stayed the same. Fortunately this time I haven't had any gains so far, but I know it can happen.

Something as normal as getting invited to a friend's for dinner, or having an all day meeting at work where they bring in food can seem like an obstacle to success.  Holidays, busy days, days where you just didn't plan it right and didn't get your workout in until it was late and you were too tired to do it -- these happen. 

My plan is to do the best I can without giving in entirely.  At a restaurant, I order the healthiest thing I can find, then cut the whole thing in half anyway.  I have the server pack up half for me to take home before I even start eating so I don't see it on or near my plate.  If I'm tired and the choice is between cooking in and eating out and I have food in the fridge, I pick cooking in then go to bed a little earlier than I would otherwise.  If I don't have time to do weights and aerobics back-to-back on my strength training days, I do the weights and come back to the aerobics later when I have more time.  If I'm at a function and I'm served something inconsistent with my diet, I try to eat just the parts that are consistent.  And if I eat at the high end of my calorie range one day, I try to eat at the low end the next.

The biggest obstacle I will have to face is maintenance.  By then the novelty of the diet and exercise will have worn off and I know I'll be wanting a cheeseburger and chocolate lava cake.  The positive reinforcement of the continued losses will be gone, and I'll have to figure out how to get jazzed by something as undramatic as not gaining. 

Then again, I'll have my old self back, and seeing her in the mirror again ought to be reinforcement enough.

**Morgana**

"When I Was a Kid, We Didn't Have [Insert Noun of Choice] Like That..."

Since the day after last Halloween, my children have been expressing their costume preferences for this year which seem to change on a weekly basis.  My stock response has been straight from my mother's own annals: "If you still want to be a [insert noun of the week] when Halloween comes, we'll see if we can find a [insert noun of the week again] costume for you.  Halloween is a long way away yet and you may change your mind."  A few weeks ago, when the Halloween specialty stores started popping up and you could no longer walk into a drug or grocery store without bumping into entire aisles colored orange and black, my kids were no longer buying it.  The five-year-old in particular gave me a look that said, "Just because you're in denial about the speed with which the second half of your life is rushing by and scared of confronting your own mortality doesn't mean Halloween isn't here, dammit."  Ok, maybe I'm projecting just a little.  (But only just a little; if you'd seen the look, you'd know.)

So soon we'll be looking for a lion costume and an as yet undecided second costume (the three-year-old is still waffling).  Last year we had a Dark Knight Batman and a Darth Vader.  Here's Darth:

What amazes me about kids' costumes these days is how much nicer they are than when I was growing up.  Look at the detail on that helmet.  It's a sturdy, hard plastic, a far cry from the mystery material that seemed to be part cardboard/part nylon they made Halloween masks out of in my youth.  And though you can't see it in the photo above, you can see from the catalogue photo that the costume is a soft, comfortable jump suit that at least makes an attempt at verisimilitude with a graphic of colored buttons to resemble Darth's blinking-lighted bodice, a belt and a cape.  Light saber not included, but available separately. 

When I was a kid, unless your mother could sew (mine couldn't) or you were old enough to create your own costume out of your various family members' closets and your mother's make-up case, costumes came in cheesy, flimsy cardboard boxes with clear cellophane windows on the front.  They consisted of the aforementioned mask and some odd smock thing made out of what I remember as scratchy nylon burlap.  They were also just plain bizarre.  More often than not, they had a picture of the thing you were supposed to be on the front of the costume.  So if you were a witch, you'd have a picture of a witch on your chest.  Take a look at this retro costumes site to see what I mean.  I remember as a child questioning this odd, post-modern-without-knowing-it design choice.  Even a seven year old knows Mickey Mouse doesn't wear a picture of himself.  Costumes have definitely come a long way. 

Once I started thinking about the differences in costumes, I naturally (for me anyway) meandered to thinking about other things that kids now take for granted that I would have loved to have growing up.  Videos and DVDs!  Imagine getting to see The Wizard of Oz any time you want, not just when it rolls around once a year on network television!  Computers!  The other day, the five-year-old saw me surfing away and asked whether I liked to play with computers when I was his age.  Now I know how my mother felt when she had to explain they didn't have television when she was growing up.  (Way to help me avoid confronting that mortality issue, thanks.)  He also saw me taking an LP out of a sleeve and asked "What kind of CD is that?" which was doubly amusing to me as a friend had told me long ago her son referred to record albums as "big CDs."

I do think that my life would have been much different if computers had been around during my childhood.  As an only child, I spent a lot of time lonely and bored.  There were only so many hours a day you could read books, watch reruns, swim, or hit tennis balls against the side of the house during summers when school was out and when your best friends were all on the road with their families.  Something as interactive and absorbing as, oh say, a graphic adventure or computer RPG would have made a lot of difference.  I suspect some of my tendency to become absorbed in computer games even now is just back-filling against those years.

There are also things they just don't make any more for which I am nostalgic and would love to share with my kids.  Whenever we visited my grandparents in Brooklyn, my dad would take me down to the corner store and buy me a Pensy Pinky or two.  We'd take them over to the park down the street and play handball.  Actually, he'd play handball and I'd try to keep up.  Another example:  Astonishingly, my mother bought a Sixfinger when I was about four.  I would find pieces of it in odd places for years afterwards.  She was pretty much opposed to toy guns (though in later years I had a cowboy set, a popgun and various water pistols), but I am sure she got the Sixfinger because she thought it was funny.  Her sense of humor ranged from extremely sophisticated to utterly silly.

Some of the things we 60s and 70s kids played with are still around, though the packaging has changed.  For a bit of fun, take a look at the Barbie case and the Playdoh. I had a similar Barbie case; I still have it in the garage somewhere.  It seems so innocent and simple compared to the ones available today when having 15 dolls to store is apparently common enough to warrant such a device, and when Barbie has her own web site.  A modelling clay purist, I only just tolerated Playdoh as a child and still find the smell revolting.

I have a feeling there is more to be said on this topic another time, but for now I'll leave you with the observation that the one thing that hasn't seemed to change that much is toy advertising.  The toys always look so much more fun than they turn out to be.  I also chuckled at the boxtop reference in that video -- I made one to a twenty-something WoW guildmate and was met with the online equivalent of a blank stare...

**Morgana**

Hiatus Interruptus

My abrupt disappearance from the blogosphere for almost a year can't fairly be blamed entirely on the repair of my home network last winter, which gave me access to World of Warcraft on my sadly outdated gaming rig. Although I descended into Northrend for a good six months, long enough to get Unchychunch, my shaman, capable of dps high enough not to drag others down in Naxx and to off a few bosses in each of its wings, long about May I bit the bullet and joined Facebook, yet another online time sink (at least until the novelty wears off).

Around the same time, work went through an out of control period of intensity until around mid-July. By the time that was over, I looked back, as I often have, at my most recent gaming spate with a feeling somewhere between fascination and disgust at how completely my non-work life had come to revolve around WoW. There was no withdrawal to speak of, so it has been easy not to go back. I don't even really miss it, mostly because I'd started to become disenchanted around the time the fates conspired to take me offline again. I found myself upset more often than not because I couldn't get anything other than a fill-in raiding spot. The majority of my then-guild appeared to live in the Central or Eastern time zones but to have chosen a Pacific time zone server for reasons known only to themselves. As a result, they started raiding at 4 or 5 p.m. on weekdays my time, which just didn't work for me. Escapism that is frustrating is no escapism at all, so I escaped from my escapist frustration.

So now, I'm doing things with my "free" time that are no doubt much better for my body and soul. I've combined the nutritional elements of three different weight loss programs into one, tweaked them some, and this, along with approximately an hour of exercise most days, is enabling me to make good on my long overdue resolution to get back to my mid-twenties weight. I'm about halfway to goal, and another fifteen pounds to stretch goal. Along the way, I looked online for inspiration and discovered the screamingly funny writings of Shauna Reid. I also developed a fascination with The Biggest Loser, which my kids call the "watching fat people get skinny show." Though I'm more than 75 pounds too light to qualify, and though I'd rather die than cry about my personal shortcomings and spew my stomach contents from overtraining (or indeed for any reason) in front of millions of people I don't know, I do fantasize about having Jillian Michaels as my personal trainer, psychotherapist and weight loss dominatrix. I'm even toying with the idea of trying to run another marathon on the 21st anniversary of my first and only, but I don't think I can swing the training schedule. If I start now, I might make the 25th anniversary, though.  Here's a memento from my only marathon to date:

On another note, we have a kindergartener in the house and I'm just tickled about it. He came home the other day and explained to me what an ellipsis is. There's something charming about a five-year-old who hasn't yet fully broken the reading code opining on "the three dots that means something is missing." August and September have been full of school-related tasks and commitments; I'm hoping things have settled down for good.

I may be one of the only people in the world who remembers the names of their first school readers, and I'm probably one of even fewer people in the world who have good enough memories of them to track them down on Alibris. Opening Books (cool picture of the inside at this link), A Magic Box, and Things You See (another cool picture) are winging their respective ways to my doorstep and I'm looking forward to cracking them open with my little emergent reader.

That's the nutshell version of how I spent my winter, spring and summer hiatus. There's a ton more to it of course, but even this much is too much for Morgie's Spot. I vowed when I started this thing I'd write about ideas, books, movies, writing, politics, memories, people other than myself, and other topics I find interesting rather than making this a (yawn) personal diary. Just thought I owed an explanation for the rather crevasse-like gap between posts.

**Morgana**